The emergence of the Internet and the reliance by business and consumers on the transfer of data in all daily activities requires telecommunications networks and components that can deliver ever increasing amounts of data at faster speeds with higher quality levels. Current telecommunications networks fail to meet these requirements. Currently, data networks are constructed with a variety of switches and routers that are interconnected, typically as a full or partial mesh, in order to attempt to provide connectivity for data transport over a large geographic area.
In order to try to meet the increasing bandwidth requirements in these networks, in very large Internet Protocol (IP) networks, aggregation routers at the fringes of the network will feed large amounts of data to a hierarchy of increasingly large optical cross-connects within a mesh network. These existing switching architectures are limited in the switching speeds and data capacity that can be processed between switches in a non-blocking manner. Current electrical switching architectures are generally limited to a switching speed of 40-100 Gigabits. In an attempt to overcome this limitation, current electrical and optical routers use this aggregation of slower switches to increase the overall switching speed of the router. For example, a system may combine a hundred one (1) Gigabit routers to increase the switching speed of the system. However, while the overall speed and capacity will exceed one Gigabit, this aggregation will not result in full 100 Gigabit per second speed and capacity, resulting in a decreased efficiency (less than full realization of switching capability). Furthermore, aggregation increases costs due to the increased number of routers and increases complexity due to interconnect and routing issues. In addition to the issues surrounding data routing speed, electronic telecommunication routing systems all face difficult transference issues when interfacing with optical data packets. Another technique used in electrical telecommunication routing systems to increase data routing speed is parallel processing. However, this technique has its own limitations including control complexity (it is difficult to control the multiple routers operating in parallel). In any of these techniques involving multiple routers to increase the processing speed, a single control machine must arbitrate among the many multiple machines that increases control complexity, cost and ultimately uses an electronic control machine that is limited by electronic processing speeds.
FIGS. 1 and 2 will illustrate the limitations of these prior art systems. FIG. 1 shows a typical prior art local network cluster 10 that uses an interconnect structure with multiple routers and switches to provide the local geographic area with a bandwidth capability greater than that possible with any one switch in the router 10. Network 10 includes four routers 12, which will be assumed to be 300 Gigabit per second routers, each of which serves a separate area of 150 Gbps of local traffic. Thus, the 300 Gigabit capacity is divided by assigning 150 Gigabits per second (Gbps) to the incoming traffic on local traffic links 16 and assigning 50 Gbps to each of three links 14. Thus, each link 14 connects the router 12 to every other router in the network 10, thereby consuming the other 150 gigabit capacity of the router 12. This interconnectivity is in the form of a balanced “mesh” that allows each router 12 to communicate directly with every other router 12 in the network 10.
This configuration has a number of limitations. While the four local geographic areas produce a total of 600 Gbps of capacity, the network 10 requires four routers 12 of 300 Gbps each, or 1200 Gbps of total router capacity, to provide the interconnectivity required to allow direct communication between all routers 12. Additionally, even though fully connected, each router 12 does not have access to all of the capacity from any other router 12. Thus, only one third of the local traffic (i.e., only 50 Gbps of the total potential 150 Gbps) can be switched directly from any one router 12 to another router 12, and the total potential traffic demand is 600 Gigabits per second. In order to carry more traffic over a link 14, a larger capacity would be required at each router 12 (for example, to carry all 150 Gbps over a link 14 between routers, each link 14 would need to be a 150 Gbps link and each router 12 would have to have an additional 300 Gbps capacity). Thus, to get full connectivity and full capacity, a non-blocking cluster network 10 having a mesh configuration would require routers with 600 Gbps capacity each which equates to 2400 Gbps total router capacity (or four times the combined traffic capacity of the local geographic areas).
FIG. 2 shows another prior art optical cross-connect mesh network 18 that aggregates sixteen data lines 20 that each can carry up to one hundred sixty gigabit per second of data that appears to have the potential capacity of 2.5 Terabits (16 lines carrying 160 Gbps each). Each of the data lines 20 is routed through an edge router 22 to an interconnected edge network 24 (e.g., a ring, mesh, ADM backbone or other known interconnection method) via carrying lines 26. However, due to inefficiencies in this network configuration (as described above), the full potential of 2.5 Terabits cannot be achieved without a tremendous increase in the size of the edge routers 22. For example, if the edge routers are each 320 Gbps routers, then 160 Gbps is used to take incoming data from incoming data line 20 and only 160 Gbps of access remains to send data to each of the other fifteen routers 22 in the cluster 18 (i.e., approximately 10 Gbps can be allotted to each of the other fifteen routers, resulting in greater than 90% blockage of data between routers). Furthermore, the capacity of the routers is already underutilized as the overall router capacity of the network cluster 18 is 5 terabits per second (Tbps), while the data capacity actually being serviced is 2.5 Tbps. Even with the router capacity underutilized, the network 18 has over 90% blockage between interconnected routers through the edge network 24. To increase the capacity between routers in a non-blocking manner, the individual routers would need to be increased in capacity tremendously, which increases cost and further exacerbates the underutilization problems already existing in the network.
FIG. 3 illustrates a typical hierarchy of an example prior art network 11 consisting of smaller routers 23 connected to larger aggregation routers 21 which in turn connect to a connected network 27 of optical cross-connects 25 for transport of IP data in a circuit switched fashion utilizing waves or lambdas (i.e., one lambda per switched circuit path). Even though the larger aggregation routers 21 have high capacity for IP data traffic, these larger aggregation routers 21 require even larger capacity optical cross-connects 25 to establish the connectivity to the other aggregation routers 21 in order to communicate data. The optical cross-connects 25, although extremely large in capacity (e.g., on the order of 10 to 100 times the capacity of the aggregation routers 21), nevertheless require multiple units interconnected as a mesh in order to provide the total capacity needed for the combined data capacity of the aggregation routers 21 taken together. The aggregation routers 21 simply do not have sufficient port capacity to be able to communicate with their peers without the aid of the optical cross-connect mesh network 27 for sufficient transport capacity. In addition, no single optical cross-connect 25 has sufficient capacity to carry all of the aggregation router 21 traffic. Therefore, multiple optical cross-connect units 25 meshed together in a network 27 are required to carry the total aggregation router 21 IP traffic of the network 11 in a distributed fashion.
In addition, network 11 of FIG. 3 suffers from severe blocking because each aggregation router 21 cannot dynamically communicate all of its data at any one time to any of its peer aggregation routers 21 in network 11. Moreover, the optical cross-connect network 27 has a relatively static configuration that can only transport a fraction of any particular aggregation router's 21 data to the other aggregation routers 21 in the network 11. Even though the optical cross-connect network 27 utilizes a large number of high capacity optical cross-connects 25, the cross-connect network 27 has the limitation of a large number of inter-machine trunks that are required between cross-connect units 25 in order for the mesh to have sufficient capacity to support the total data transport requirement of all of the aggregation routers 21. Unfortunately, the inter-machine trunks between the optical cross-connects 25 consume capacity at the expense of ports that could otherwise be used for additional aggregation router 21 capacity. Therefore, the network 11 is a “port-poor” network that is generally inefficient, costly, and unable to accommodate the dynamic bandwidth and connectivity requirements of an ever changing, high capacity IP network.
Therefore, a need exists for an optical telecommunications network and switching architecture that will provide full, non-blocking routing between edge routers in a network on a port-to-port (i.e., ingress port to egress port) basis and controlled at the input (ingress) side of the routing network.